Managerial changes and the development of a marketing department

Gryskiewicz continues to discuss some of the organizational changes that the Center for Creative Leadership faced in the late 1970s into the mid-1980s, when Walt Ulmer assumed the presidency. In particular, Gryskiewicz focuses on how the Center sought to more fully develop its marketing department, while it continues to forge new ground in curriculum development for its creativity programs. Throughout the passage, he stresses the roles various individuals played in this process.

Citing this Excerpt

Oral History Interview with Stan Gryskiewicz, January 15, 1999. Interview S-0017. Southern Oral History Program Collection (#4007) in the Southern Oral History Program Collection, Southern Historical Collection, Wilson Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Full Text of the Excerpt

JOSEPH MOSNIER:

Let me ask you about early 80's, Ken Clark's
tenure. Tom Bridgers mentioned to me that that was a period when boy,
there was a lot of long term planning going on. People were writing
memos and studies and organization plans and all kinds of things trying
to find a way. Do you have recollections about that? Did you have a
sense of that CCL was sort of trying to restructure itself or reorganize
itself or refocus itself?

STAN GRYSKIEWICZ:

There was a sense of that but I don't remember as many memos
going back and forth about it. But there was this sense
of—well, that's not true because DeVries was
running the show by then, right?

JOSEPH MOSNIER:

Yeah.

STAN GRYSKIEWICZ:

DeVries, again, part of his savvy of manipulating and working with the
board or senior people, that was all part of the show. There was a lot
of that going on, Tom was right. But you know, some of us in the
trenches were saying let David do that. We'll go out and do
things. There was still some of us who had been around from the
beginning who thought that was the appropriate way to act. We had become
larger and larger, it's less flexibility. It'd be
very easy to get away with. But yes, Tom's right.

JOSEPH MOSNIER:

Another question before I turn to Ulmer and his arrival in
'85 and some of the reorganization in '87 and so
forth. Do you have recollections of—I guess along the way
here in the 80's, there's an effort made by CCL to
organize more formally a marketing department, if you will.
I'm thinking of Linda Helgerson and Bill Drath and so forth.
Did you have much opportunity to work with these folks at all, have
contact with these folks?

STAN GRYSKIEWICZ:

Linda Helgerson, I told you she had more balls than most of the guys
here. That she just drove it and said you guys are living in la-la land.
You guys don't even have brochures. You don't know
how to interface with the outside world. And so she was good about that.
But I don't think she was a marketing person. I just think
she had some savvy about how you appear to the outside world. She may
have been more of a PR person.

JOSEPH MOSNIER:

I see.

STAN GRYSKIEWICZ:

So there was attempts at doing that. Again, this was one of
Campbell's decisions. He brought in Helgerson. And it was
again, one of these interesting people who along with that interest and
activity in moving things forward had some negative sides to her. And
she brought in Bill Drath and Bill Drath came in with his ponytail from
Chapel Hill. And he was a writer for her. She brought him in as a writer
and I think he was part-time driving back and forth to Chapel Hill. And
just Drath has made a great contribution here and will continue making
great contributions. But he did come in as a part-time writer for
Helgerson. But he wasn't a marketing person. He was a writer.
I mean if we had brought in a marketing person, they would have probably
organized it differently and we wouldn't have had Drath here.
But Drath, that was a great investment in Bill.

Brought in a guy named Mark who lasted about two or three years and he
tried to get them to—he'd been selling socks or
pantyhose with the textile company and he tried to impose that kind of
structure upon this organization. And some of the issues that they went
through was let's review all our courses and see which ones
work. And I had some personal problems with that because some of the
newer courses were compared to the same criteria that the older courses
were. And so some of the newer courses were dropped before they really
had a chance to develop themselves. They had limited resources, so they
focused on what they felt were the big winners. But that was the first
attempt at coming up with some structured approach. Mark, Mark.
There's a Mark in here. He was brought in and he was the
first, I think, attempt because he actually came from a marketing
background.

JOSEPH MOSNIER:

You mentioned that they opposed these—had this rigorous look
at some of these new programs and decided to let them go. Do you think
that there were—I mean how serious was that over the long
term for CCL, as you look back and speculate against what the prospects
for some of these programs might have been if given greater opportunity
to find a place?

STAN GRYSKIEWICZ:

I think we would have had a larger footprint in the area of creativity
in courses like—we introduced a course called Implementing
Innovation which lasted for about three or four years while I was around
and active with it. But we brought in intact cross-functional teams. So
instead of signing up 24 individuals, we'd sign up four six
person teams. And we would take them through the whole product
development cycle and they would bring with them a real product they
were working on. And we would visit them on site before they would come
so we had a sense of what their problems were and their background
setting. And we would assign them a, not a counselor, but it was
somebody who would follow that group around all week and be their
feedback processors. So we did a lot of interesting things but we had
dumb things going. Our system didn't handle it well. Like we
had a system that individuals would sign up but
now we're having groups sign up, how do we do that? Or a
group is cancelling, oh, my God. It was just a zoo and stupid just
because we were treating these new courses with the same criteria and
the same systems for the ongoing individual sign up for course churn it
out kind of thing. And those were seen as not something novel, it
isn't as useful. It was seen as boy, this is getting in the
way of our system here, let's get rid of this sucker. So I
think we would have had a stronger foothold in creativity. I think if I
had been more of a manager, we would have had a stronger foothold in
creativity.

JOSEPH MOSNIER:

So is that to say you might have resisted the demise of these programs a
little more aggressively?

STAN GRYSKIEWICZ:

Right. And I think if you went to this organization now and said who are
the creativity people, there would be about four of us that they would
identify for creativity. And the rest of the people—so I
think we would have still had a creativity division or something around
that nature.

JOSEPH MOSNIER:

And was it ultimately Ulmer who set into place this momentum to pare
down and streamline?